Argument from personal experience

The argument from personal experience, also known as personal revelation, is the sensation of a direct experience of God or the supernatural. This can be a feeling of divine presence or in the form of conversation, vision or creative inspiration. This argument is particularly common among certain branches of Christianity where things like possession and levitating have been reported. Many believers do not have personal revelations and have other foundations for their beliefs.

The argument

I had a personal experience of God

God exists

Example of usage

"Jesus appeared to me in a vision, thus I know the doctrine of Christianity is true."

"Jesus had knocked on the door of my heart and asked me to open up. And I had done so. Jesus lived in my heart and affected every action I took. [...] Sometimes when afraid, loney or distressed, a voice spoke to me, comforting me, guiding me through the labrynth of my own mind. I came to associate this voice with God and he spoke to me often in times of great distress. Like a guardian angel, this voice protected me from my own fears. [...] This voice seemed different from my own internal voice, because it spoke with a ring of authority. And everything it said seemed profound, insightful and important. Whenever I heard a voice like this, I labelled it as God speaking to me. [...] I felt God's tangible presence in church. When we were all together, sometimes a spirit moved through us. I was sure that this was God. [...] These perceptions of a personal relationship with God were my strongest evidence that he existed. To me, my experience of God was every bit as real as the visible world around me, as real as the people I saw, the papers I wrote or the wonders of the universe. For me, this experience was reality. [1]"

"I saw a ghost with a friend of mine - I am not a liar, an attention seeker. Neither was I overtired when this happened."

Counter-apologetics

Testimony is not necessarily a reliable source for claims that cannot be independently observed.

Experience of God as a psychological effect

Both believers and non-believers experience spirituality, beauty and morally uplifted emotions [2]. Imaginary friends are a common occurrence normally associated with childhood [3] and often are considered to be guardians. God may be a conceptual "hyperreality", in which the consciousness cannot distinguish between an actual God or a representation of God that is interacted with as if it really is God. [1] Humans have cognitive biases that make us perceive supposedly meaning patterns in random data; this effect is called apophenia. Expectation of certain outcomes makes use selective on the evidence we consider in an effect called confirmation bias. Existent or not, mundane events would then be interpreted as a sign from God. These phenomena can make believers experience real emotions because the simulation of God occurs subconsciously. If God is simulated by believers but has no reality, then God is a simulacrum.

"Was the voice of God that I'd heard my whole life simply my own voice? [1]"

Humans tend to presume the existence of an intelligence agent inappropriately; this effect is called "hyperactive agency detection". This bias may have had an evolutionary origin, as the consequences of failing to spot a predator could be fatal.

"The high cost of failing to detect agents and the low cost of wrongly detecting them has led researchers to suggest that people possess a Hyperactive Agent Detection Device, a cognitive module that readily ascribes events in the environment to the behavior of agents.[4]"

Belief in God could be a by-product of all these cognitive biases. The result is that some believers experience a relationship with God and sincerely relate their experiences to others.

Epilepsy

Recently, there has been a great deal of work done on the subject of temporal lope epilepsy and its relationship to religious visions. Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran has written a great deal on the subject, asserting that the cause of many visions that religious leaders have had over the years may have been caused by neurological function. The pervasiveness of simulated religious experiences during temporal lobe seizures offers sufficient reason to be skeptical of the claim that a vision of Jesus might actually be caused by the presence of Jesus, and not by an incidental error in the wiring of the brain.

Which God?

Another problem with personal revelation is that so many people from other religions experience it too, yet they don't all experience the Christian god. If personal revelation in the case of Christianity is to be believed then one must also believe the Muslim when they say they've had personal revelation of Allah.

It is also often noted that individuals in a particular society only ever have visions of the deities and prophets associated with the societies that they have been exposed to. A person in sub-Saharan Africa who has never been exposed to Hinduism has not had a vision of Krisna or Vishnu, and a person in Saudi Arabia who has never been exposed to Christianity has never had a vision of Jesus. However, this move towards the evidence is somewhat controversial, as apologists may be liable to assert the possibility of exceptions to this rule. Such exceptions are plausible, in the form of figures resembling, for example, the Virgin Mary, but usually rely on vague descriptions of the religious figure in question.

People in the same religion do not experience consistent revelations. We might expect a consistent God to be experienced in a uniform way.

A counter argument to this point is the all gods are aspects of the same God: God is so vast and difficult to comprehend that each person experiences a different aspect of God. If this were the case, overall patterns would merged of a single entity but this has not occurred.

No extraordinary or consistent knowledge

The revelation never includes information that the recipient could not possibly have known and can be independently verified, such as the time and location at which the next earthquake would occur, or any number of as-yet-unsolved problems in science, or even the meaning of "frontlets" in the Bible (Exodus 13:16).